Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance

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CSAF Impact

CSAF members are united by our common goals of supporting agricultural businesses so that they in turn can build livelihoods for small-scale producers and enhance environmental sustainability.

Each lender independently developed social and environmental metrics to begin to measure and monitor its success against these goals. As a council, the lenders converged upon shared metrics that collectively tell a concise story about the scale of our impact, individually and as a group. Members used the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) taxonomy developed by the Global Impact Investment Network (GIIN) as their standard. Our intention is to use this as a baseline against which to track our impact in the future, and potentially upon which to add additional metrics. More detailed performance and impact data can be found in CSAF's annual reports.

*Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) is a catalog of generally accepted performance metrics that leading impact investors use to measure social, environmental, and financial success, http://iris.thegiin.org

CSAF members track metrics within their organizations, which are then aggregated by a third-party partner and shared on an annual basis.

Social and environmental metrics such as these testify to the scale of the impact of social lenders, but not to the depth of impact (i.e., how significant was the impact on each smallholder farmer reached). Nor do these metrics establish attribution or causality. Some individual lenders conduct impact evaluations with selected clients to address these challenging questions.